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Nouveau NVIDIA Driver To Enter Linux 2.6.33 Kernel
An anonymous reader writes "Not only is DRBD to be included in the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, but so is the Nouveau driver. The Nouveau driver is the free software driver that was created by clean-room reverse engineering NVIDIA's binary Linux driver. It has been in development for several years with 2D, 3D, and video support. The DRM component is set to enter the Linux 2.6.33 kernel as a staging driver. This is coming as a surprise move after yesterday Linus began ranting over Red Hat not upstreaming Nouveau and then Red Hat attributing this delay to microcode issues. The microcode issue is temporarily worked around by removing it from the driver itself and using the kernel's firmware loader to insert this potentially copyrighted work instead."
No it means that linux will ship with an open source alternative to the closed source Nvidia drivers.
How do the Nouveau Nvidia drivers compare to the official ones?
Slower on every machine I've tested.
The official closed source driver creates a proprietary dependency on an otherwise open OS kernel.
This irks some free software hippies and it also makes using Nvidia hardware on unsupported hardware platforms more difficult.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
DRM in this context means Direct Rendering Manager and not Digital Rights Management
That would be way more time-intensive and way harder....
And I know fuck all about Linux, so it must work easily. I read nvidia cards worked well, and it certainly seemed to go smoother than the Radeon in my old laptop.
You've probably paid for it with operating system crashes. Your time spent waiting for a reboot, re-creating lost work, and troubleshooting the failure is probably worth money. If a driver is Free (in the GNU sense), developers of the kernel and the X server can trace into it to see what's going wrong. Interactions with black boxes are much harder to debug.
DRM in this context means Direct Rendering Manager and not Digital Rights Management
Thanks. I was reading through the comments looking for the usual DRM rants.
And here is the page that describes current 3d support in Gallium3D: http://www.x.org/wiki/GalliumStatus
Notice the sea of grey under the nVidia chipsets. So if you want games, keep using the binary for now.
A motherboard with an integrated intel graphic card. They are not as fast as ATI/Nvidia, but they work great for things like desktop compositting, and the driver is the most complete and stable driver available in the FOSS world.
It also irks people who noticed that a huge amount of devices didn't get 64 bit Windows drivers, because it was a lot more profitable to get people to buy new scanners, printers and webcams. Precisely thanks to this I now have a perfectly good color laser printer and scanner that my brother can't use anymore.
Experience shows that if you trust the manufacturer will release updated drivers when they become needed, you're going to get screwed sooner or later. His new scanner (also made by Canon, guess he doesn't learn) looks nearly identical, and has pretty much the same specs. The only difference is that the light has been replaced with LEDs, but really he didn't gain anything from the new model.
I've often wondered why more reverse engineering isn't done to create Linux drivers rather than just complaining about the manufacturer of the hardware.
Because these days it's really, really hard.
A modern graphics card, for example, is actually a complete computer. It's got RAM, a processor, a bunch of peripherals, a complete miniature operating system... and you don't even know what type of processor it is. A lot of peripherals work like this; a wireless card is typically an ARM processor with some RAM attached on one end to the radio and on the other to an I/O controller that talks to the computer.
So in order to reverse engineer a graphics card you both need to decompile your way through multiple megabytes of binary blob driver that runs on the PC, but also decompile your way through multiple megabytes of binary blob operating system image that runs on the card... and you don't even know what the CPU architecture is!
It's actually more productive to hassle the manufacturers into releasing documentation. Which in some ways is a pity; it would be really cool to be able to run your own bare-metal OS on the GPU.
If you're looking for a specific card, this is in my office Dell Optiplex workstation, I think it's an EVGA, it was ~$50 at the time.
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 8600 GT (rev a1)
Debian Lenny with nvidia debs from non-free, dual 19 inch DVI monitors
My Quadro based laptop with the NVidia driver has no issues with suspending and hibernating, and runs generally flawlessly.
A number of reverse engineering tools were developed for the Nouveau effort. Some of that can be used for similar efforts with other hardware. Most of that can be used should a new graphics driver architecture come out of nVidia. I have often wonder how long it will take if the Nouveau status matrix gets a new column, for that new generation of card to get support. It's been like 3 years for all the existing ones.
Uhh..... No shit?
2d acceleration refers to things like textured video, for playing movies or whatnot. 3d acceleration refers to things like the rendering of 3d primitives on screen, stuff like Quake. Different sorts of math are used for each.
I certainly hope you are trolling because if not, this is a new level of ignorance that I was not aware existed.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
For composited desktop with all the wobbly windows and such, tuxracer, watching DVD's, etc., the integrated intel chips are more than adequate and have great open-source support (everything except GMA 500 they use in netbooks).
I'm told they aren't so great for the latest games.
ATI Radeon 4890 with binary ATI driverse works well for me under Ubuntu 9.10.